Decade: Reunion 1.4
Title: Decade: Reunion
Author: FlyingHigh / latetothpartyhp
Rating: PG-13
Genre: Drama / Adventure
Pairings: Chloe/Clark, Tess/Oliver
Spoilers: through Salvation, and selectively from Lazarus
Warnings: Because of when this fic starts there will be some collateral Clois and Chlollie to begin with. There was also be strong language, some violence and some mentions of sexuality. Please be sure to check individual chapters for ratings and warning changes.
Disclaimer: I don't own any of these characters, and I am receiving no money for this story. I also make no claim to anything written by T.S. Eliot, Emily Dickinson or William Shakespeare.
Summary: The last ten years have all led up to this.
Author's Note: This fic was written for selene2 , who won the bid for my services in the legendary_women auction - I hope you enjoy it! Many, many thanks to iluvaqt for beta-reading this.
Prologue / Reunion 1.0 / Reunion 1.1 / Reunion 1.2 / Reunion 1.3
Oliver got his first real sleep in three days on the flight back to Metropolis, a whole hour and a half of it. He slept soundly, which was unusual for him these days, woke as the plane landed, turned his cell phone on and immediately regretted it. He’d been deep undercover for a week and in just the last two days Clark had called him nine times and Lois thirteen. Most of them were of the “Call me!” variety, although Lois had added a few colorful metaphors to her last few messages. The last message was from Mercy, who despite having access to other methods of communication, had also apparently called him right before landing.
“The honor of your presence is requested,” she’d said. “Now.”
---------------------------
He stumbled a little walking into the Watchtower, possibly due to tiredness or possibly due to one of the many chunks of concrete littering the floor. “I’m okay,” he called out, mostly to Mercy, who was typing relentlessly across the room from him, but also to any other possibly invisible team member who would have to have also been called in for what was surely an emergency meeting, so important it required the presence of as many crime-fighters as possible, because why else would she demand his attendance right off the fucking plane?
“You need to call Clark,” Mercy answered.
“Really? That’s it? No how’s your week been, how’d the mission go?” He sank down onto the couch.
She picked up her cell phone and dialed.
“I’m glad you asked,” he continued, “It was, in fact, a pretty crap week. You’d never guess it, but turns out Bludhaven’s pretty cold this time of year. And I think there was a pack of wild dogs living in that safehouse before we got there. At least it smelled as if there’d been. You couldn’t have just texted me to call Clark?”
“It’s Phantom,” she said into the phone. “He’s here.”
“‘Phantom’? Where did that come from?”
She looked at him for the first time since he arrived and smiled. “From Bart,” she said, tapping the clear plastic orthosis she wore over the grafts on her face. “Phantom of the Watchtower.”
Oliver gaped. “He said that?” One day he was going to teach that kid how to listen when he was told to shut up.
“It’s fine,” she said. “It’s funny. It’s a joke.”
“No, no way -- “ He blinked against the sudden wind that hit his face. Opening his eyes, he saw -- “Clark.” You’re looking particularly constipated this afternoon.
“Where have you been?” Clark demanded.
Mercy, still tapping furiously at her keyboard, ignored Clark as smoothly as she’d ignored him. Maybe a little too smoothly. There was an awful lot of hyper-efficiency from that direction whenever Clark appeared. “Is there some new no-greetings-allowed security protocol you instituted while I was gone?” he asked her.
“You’ve been gone five days -- “ Clark began
“Eight,” Mercy corrected him.
“Eight days now,” Clark continued, “and you haven’t made contact once.”
“I made contact with Mercy,” he answered.
“That’s true,” she affirmed.
Clark turned to her. “So when you made contact with him, did you even bother to -- “
“Clark”, she said sharply, lifting her hands away from keyboard and coming out from behind the podium. “Limiting contact and communication even on secure channels during a mission isn’t something I just made up; it’s very standard procedure for this type of operation. It’s meant to keep both the organization and the operator safe. We can’t afford to get sloppy, and I think Chloe would be the first person to agree.”
Clark’s face turned thunderous and Oliver felt himself reaching for the lead-lined pouch in his breast-pocket. He was going to have to find a handier place to put that.
“Look,” he said, dropping his hand when Clark did, in fact, look at him. “I get that you’re mad we kept you out of the loop. We’ll make it an agenda item for the next meeting. Meanwhile,” he said, standing, “I’m gonna take a shower and then collapse. I’d ask you to join me so we could continue this discussion, but that would be a little weird.”
“You don’t have time for that,” Clark told him. “Chloe’s back.”
“She’s ... what?” He realized he was sitting again.
“Chloe’s back. She got picked up in Suicide Slums four days ago by a patrol car.”
“Oh.” He should feel happy, he thought. He should be overcome by joy and excitement right now, but he wasn’t. Instead he felt bewildered and a little removed, as if he were viewing the scene before him through a monitor. “Did you know this?” he said, looking at Tess.
She nodded.
He sat a moment, trying to digest that. For some reason though the knowledge didn’t want to take. “Alright. I guess we have another item to add to the agenda,” he said. “Where is she?” he asked Clark.
“At the farm. Lois is with her,” he added quickly.
“OK.” He tried to imagine Chloe waiting for him eagerly in the Kent kitchen, and couldn’t.
“Do you have a car here?” Clark asked him.
“Why would we take a car? We’ll be sitting three hours in rush hour traffic.”
“Lois is with her,” Clark repeated.
“Yeah, you mentioned that. I guess that means you guys still aren’t so much with the sharing.”
Clark frowned, but before he could reply Mercy interrupted. “The car’s a good idea,” she said, returning to her keyboard. “Clark can drive, and you can use the time to get some rest. You look like hell.”
She should talk, Oliver thought, and grabbed his keys.
----------------------------------------
It was past nightfall by the time they pulled into the drive, and the Kent house looked like a golden mirage in a world of darkness. He’d never told Clark, but half of why he’d supported Martha’s campaigns was to give himself an excuse to hang out at the house with her, having her gently scold him about the latest headline she’d seen with his name in it, or telling him to get out of her way, she had to get the cookies out of the oven. It would have been nice if she were here now, he thought. After what Clark had told him during the ride out, the numb, detached feeling he’d first felt in the Watchtower had grown and overtaken him; it was hard to believe any of what he saw: the Mercedes or the pokey commuters or the billboards along the freeway, as real. If Martha were here, he thought, he could believe it, although the observer inside him couldn’t say why.
But it wasn’t Martha waiting for them on the porch. It was Lois, doing her best to look cheerful and unworried. Her hug nearly knocked him over, which alarmed him in a vague way. Lois had never been cuddly.
“Hey, Lois,” he said, swallowing.
She pulled back, frowning. “About time you got here,” she said, and smacked his arm. “You could have called.”
“I was in a dead zone most of the week.”
“Well, if you have any visions of the future and decide to shoot a politician, you let us know first,” she said. Oliver shot an incredulous glance at Clark, who was busy staring through the kitchen curtains. “What did Clark tell you?” Lois continued.
“He said she’s in some kind of semi-catatonic state. She won’t do anything unless she’s told and she babbles when she’s asked questions.”
“That’s it in a nutshell,” she said. “And they can’t tell us what’s wrong with her. We took her in for an MRI and supposedly the results were inconclusive.”
“She has some odd patterns of neural activity,” Clark said. “She has a very low rate of neural firing in her dorsolateral prefrontal cortex most of the time. When she’s asked questions, it goes up. Not to normal levels, but up.”
“What does that mean?” he asked.
“We don’t know,” Lois answered grumpily. “All your Dr. Hamilton would say was that it was extremely unusual. I think we need to call in a specialist.”
“Dr. Hamilton doesn’t think that’s necessary,” Clark interjected pointedly. “He thinks rest should do the trick. She’s already shown some signs of improvement.”
“So you say,” she responded.
“What does ‘some’ improvement mean?” Oliver asked quickly. If Emil didn’t want anyone called in it could mean a lot of things, but most probably that whatever ailed Chloe would draw too much attention to her, or to the League.
“Clark says Chloe got up in the night two days ago and wandered into his room.”
“She did.” Clark nodded. “She was cold and she got under the covers on her own. She also said she was worried about Lois.”
“Did she say what had happened to her?”
“No. I asked, but that was a mistake. She just started quoting poetry again.”
“Huh?” Oliver got that Chloe liked to read, but when she did it was almost always something like The Rootkit Arsenal. If she was quoting anything, he thought, it would be program code. But why would she do it in response to questions? Was this what people with low dorsal-whatever activity did?
“She does that when she’s asked questions,” Lois said. “At lunch today I forgot and asked her what she wanted to eat and she started in on Green Eggs and Ham. In the doctor’s professional opinion, that’s one of the things that makes her case so unusual. Amazing what four years of medical school will teach you.”
“But she was able to talk to you the other night normally?” he asked Clark.
“Before I started asking questions, yes, but it was after she saw Lois for the first time. I think it may have to do with seeing people she cares about. I’ve been hoping that if she spent some time with you,” the other man said pointedly, “she might have another break-through.”
He nodded. That made as much sense as anything did right now. Ephemeral as it all seemed, he realized his heart was sprinting in his chest, beating harder than it had the entire week in Bludhaven on the trail of a group of shoot-first-ask-questions-later gun-runners.
“I should go talk to her then,” he said.
Author: FlyingHigh / latetothpartyhp
Rating: PG-13
Genre: Drama / Adventure
Pairings: Chloe/Clark, Tess/Oliver
Spoilers: through Salvation, and selectively from Lazarus
Warnings: Because of when this fic starts there will be some collateral Clois and Chlollie to begin with. There was also be strong language, some violence and some mentions of sexuality. Please be sure to check individual chapters for ratings and warning changes.
Disclaimer: I don't own any of these characters, and I am receiving no money for this story. I also make no claim to anything written by T.S. Eliot, Emily Dickinson or William Shakespeare.
Summary: The last ten years have all led up to this.
Author's Note: This fic was written for selene2 , who won the bid for my services in the legendary_women auction - I hope you enjoy it! Many, many thanks to iluvaqt for beta-reading this.
Prologue / Reunion 1.0 / Reunion 1.1 / Reunion 1.2 / Reunion 1.3
Oliver got his first real sleep in three days on the flight back to Metropolis, a whole hour and a half of it. He slept soundly, which was unusual for him these days, woke as the plane landed, turned his cell phone on and immediately regretted it. He’d been deep undercover for a week and in just the last two days Clark had called him nine times and Lois thirteen. Most of them were of the “Call me!” variety, although Lois had added a few colorful metaphors to her last few messages. The last message was from Mercy, who despite having access to other methods of communication, had also apparently called him right before landing.
“The honor of your presence is requested,” she’d said. “Now.”
---------------------------
He stumbled a little walking into the Watchtower, possibly due to tiredness or possibly due to one of the many chunks of concrete littering the floor. “I’m okay,” he called out, mostly to Mercy, who was typing relentlessly across the room from him, but also to any other possibly invisible team member who would have to have also been called in for what was surely an emergency meeting, so important it required the presence of as many crime-fighters as possible, because why else would she demand his attendance right off the fucking plane?
“You need to call Clark,” Mercy answered.
“Really? That’s it? No how’s your week been, how’d the mission go?” He sank down onto the couch.
She picked up her cell phone and dialed.
“I’m glad you asked,” he continued, “It was, in fact, a pretty crap week. You’d never guess it, but turns out Bludhaven’s pretty cold this time of year. And I think there was a pack of wild dogs living in that safehouse before we got there. At least it smelled as if there’d been. You couldn’t have just texted me to call Clark?”
“It’s Phantom,” she said into the phone. “He’s here.”
“‘Phantom’? Where did that come from?”
She looked at him for the first time since he arrived and smiled. “From Bart,” she said, tapping the clear plastic orthosis she wore over the grafts on her face. “Phantom of the Watchtower.”
Oliver gaped. “He said that?” One day he was going to teach that kid how to listen when he was told to shut up.
“It’s fine,” she said. “It’s funny. It’s a joke.”
“No, no way -- “ He blinked against the sudden wind that hit his face. Opening his eyes, he saw -- “Clark.” You’re looking particularly constipated this afternoon.
“Where have you been?” Clark demanded.
Mercy, still tapping furiously at her keyboard, ignored Clark as smoothly as she’d ignored him. Maybe a little too smoothly. There was an awful lot of hyper-efficiency from that direction whenever Clark appeared. “Is there some new no-greetings-allowed security protocol you instituted while I was gone?” he asked her.
“You’ve been gone five days -- “ Clark began
“Eight,” Mercy corrected him.
“Eight days now,” Clark continued, “and you haven’t made contact once.”
“I made contact with Mercy,” he answered.
“That’s true,” she affirmed.
Clark turned to her. “So when you made contact with him, did you even bother to -- “
“Clark”, she said sharply, lifting her hands away from keyboard and coming out from behind the podium. “Limiting contact and communication even on secure channels during a mission isn’t something I just made up; it’s very standard procedure for this type of operation. It’s meant to keep both the organization and the operator safe. We can’t afford to get sloppy, and I think Chloe would be the first person to agree.”
Clark’s face turned thunderous and Oliver felt himself reaching for the lead-lined pouch in his breast-pocket. He was going to have to find a handier place to put that.
“Look,” he said, dropping his hand when Clark did, in fact, look at him. “I get that you’re mad we kept you out of the loop. We’ll make it an agenda item for the next meeting. Meanwhile,” he said, standing, “I’m gonna take a shower and then collapse. I’d ask you to join me so we could continue this discussion, but that would be a little weird.”
“You don’t have time for that,” Clark told him. “Chloe’s back.”
“She’s ... what?” He realized he was sitting again.
“Chloe’s back. She got picked up in Suicide Slums four days ago by a patrol car.”
“Oh.” He should feel happy, he thought. He should be overcome by joy and excitement right now, but he wasn’t. Instead he felt bewildered and a little removed, as if he were viewing the scene before him through a monitor. “Did you know this?” he said, looking at Tess.
She nodded.
He sat a moment, trying to digest that. For some reason though the knowledge didn’t want to take. “Alright. I guess we have another item to add to the agenda,” he said. “Where is she?” he asked Clark.
“At the farm. Lois is with her,” he added quickly.
“OK.” He tried to imagine Chloe waiting for him eagerly in the Kent kitchen, and couldn’t.
“Do you have a car here?” Clark asked him.
“Why would we take a car? We’ll be sitting three hours in rush hour traffic.”
“Lois is with her,” Clark repeated.
“Yeah, you mentioned that. I guess that means you guys still aren’t so much with the sharing.”
Clark frowned, but before he could reply Mercy interrupted. “The car’s a good idea,” she said, returning to her keyboard. “Clark can drive, and you can use the time to get some rest. You look like hell.”
She should talk, Oliver thought, and grabbed his keys.
----------------------------------------
It was past nightfall by the time they pulled into the drive, and the Kent house looked like a golden mirage in a world of darkness. He’d never told Clark, but half of why he’d supported Martha’s campaigns was to give himself an excuse to hang out at the house with her, having her gently scold him about the latest headline she’d seen with his name in it, or telling him to get out of her way, she had to get the cookies out of the oven. It would have been nice if she were here now, he thought. After what Clark had told him during the ride out, the numb, detached feeling he’d first felt in the Watchtower had grown and overtaken him; it was hard to believe any of what he saw: the Mercedes or the pokey commuters or the billboards along the freeway, as real. If Martha were here, he thought, he could believe it, although the observer inside him couldn’t say why.
But it wasn’t Martha waiting for them on the porch. It was Lois, doing her best to look cheerful and unworried. Her hug nearly knocked him over, which alarmed him in a vague way. Lois had never been cuddly.
“Hey, Lois,” he said, swallowing.
She pulled back, frowning. “About time you got here,” she said, and smacked his arm. “You could have called.”
“I was in a dead zone most of the week.”
“Well, if you have any visions of the future and decide to shoot a politician, you let us know first,” she said. Oliver shot an incredulous glance at Clark, who was busy staring through the kitchen curtains. “What did Clark tell you?” Lois continued.
“He said she’s in some kind of semi-catatonic state. She won’t do anything unless she’s told and she babbles when she’s asked questions.”
“That’s it in a nutshell,” she said. “And they can’t tell us what’s wrong with her. We took her in for an MRI and supposedly the results were inconclusive.”
“She has some odd patterns of neural activity,” Clark said. “She has a very low rate of neural firing in her dorsolateral prefrontal cortex most of the time. When she’s asked questions, it goes up. Not to normal levels, but up.”
“What does that mean?” he asked.
“We don’t know,” Lois answered grumpily. “All your Dr. Hamilton would say was that it was extremely unusual. I think we need to call in a specialist.”
“Dr. Hamilton doesn’t think that’s necessary,” Clark interjected pointedly. “He thinks rest should do the trick. She’s already shown some signs of improvement.”
“So you say,” she responded.
“What does ‘some’ improvement mean?” Oliver asked quickly. If Emil didn’t want anyone called in it could mean a lot of things, but most probably that whatever ailed Chloe would draw too much attention to her, or to the League.
“Clark says Chloe got up in the night two days ago and wandered into his room.”
“She did.” Clark nodded. “She was cold and she got under the covers on her own. She also said she was worried about Lois.”
“Did she say what had happened to her?”
“No. I asked, but that was a mistake. She just started quoting poetry again.”
“Huh?” Oliver got that Chloe liked to read, but when she did it was almost always something like The Rootkit Arsenal. If she was quoting anything, he thought, it would be program code. But why would she do it in response to questions? Was this what people with low dorsal-whatever activity did?
“She does that when she’s asked questions,” Lois said. “At lunch today I forgot and asked her what she wanted to eat and she started in on Green Eggs and Ham. In the doctor’s professional opinion, that’s one of the things that makes her case so unusual. Amazing what four years of medical school will teach you.”
“But she was able to talk to you the other night normally?” he asked Clark.
“Before I started asking questions, yes, but it was after she saw Lois for the first time. I think it may have to do with seeing people she cares about. I’ve been hoping that if she spent some time with you,” the other man said pointedly, “she might have another break-through.”
He nodded. That made as much sense as anything did right now. Ephemeral as it all seemed, he realized his heart was sprinting in his chest, beating harder than it had the entire week in Bludhaven on the trail of a group of shoot-first-ask-questions-later gun-runners.
“I should go talk to her then,” he said.